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WITH LINES DRAWN, HOUSE PANEL NEARS IMPEACHMENT VOTE

With Congress poised to open the first Presidential impeachment inquiry since the national agony of Watergate, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said today that it was his ''hope and prayer'' to complete the investigation of President Clinton by the end of the year.

The suggestion of a time limit by the chairman, Representative Henry J. Hyde, came as a prelude to what is expected to be a bitter partisan and legal struggle in the House Judiciary Committee on Monday. The committee is to consider whether to recommend, for only the second time this century, that Congress authorize a formal investigation into whether a President's actions should lead to his removal from office.

With Republicans in the majority, it is considered inevitable that on Monday or Tuesday the committee, and later this week the full House, will vote to open a formal impeachment inquiry.

The House vote will be one of Congress's last acts before it recesses for the midterm elections.

Mr. Hyde, an Illinois Republican, sought on several television news programs today to assure the nation that he would not seek to stretch out the scandal that has engulfed the White House for eight months, since Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, began investigating the President's relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky.

''I have a New Year's resolution and that is we finish by New Year's,'' Mr. Hyde said on the NBC News program ''Meet the Press,'' ''and you know how New Year's resolutions sometimes get broken, but it's my hope and prayer that we could finish by New Year's.''

But some of Mr. Hyde's own Republican committee members resisted setting such a time limit, and Democrats expressed doubts that Mr. Hyde would be able to adhere to any time frame.

''New Year's resolutions sometimes get broken,'' said Representative Richard A. Gephardt, the House minority leader, on the ABC News program ''This Week.'' ''I also don't have a lot of confidence from the way the Republicans have run other inquiries over these last two years that his wish will be followed.''

On Monday Mr. Hyde's committee, one of the most ideologically polarized in Congress, will hear David P. Schippers, the investigative counsel for the Republicans, and Abbe D. Lowell, his counterpart for the Democrats, set out clashing views of the case for and against the President.

Republicans say that in his hourlong presentation, Mr. Schippers plans to speak of the unique role of the President in the American system of government and of the importance of the oath he takes to faithfully execute the nation's laws. He is also expected to strike a very personal note about his own sorrow as a registered Democrat about the charges before him.

Mr. Schippers will not emphasize the President's sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, a former White House intern, but will argue the dangers to the nation's legal system of a President's making false statements under oath. Mr. Schippers is not expected to embrace all 11 charges of potentially impeachable offenses referred to Congress by Mr. Starr; for example, he will most likely differ with Mr. Starr over his charge that the President's claim of executive privilege in legal proceedings amounted to an abuse of power.

And he is expected to suggest that there may be other criminal violations, according to Republicans, like lying under oath or concealing a felony. A concealment charge could accuse the President or his aides of failing to alert a judge to a false affidavit, like Ms. Lewinsky's claim in the Paula Jones sexual misconduct lawsuit that she had not had a sexual relationship with Mr. Clinton.

Mr. Hyde said Mr. Schippers ''has reinterpreted and otherwise interpreted'' some of the material sent by Mr. Starr, ''so we have a little different take on it, not widely different.''

Mr. Hyde said that Congress was not judging private morality. ''We're talking about perjury, subornation of perjury, witness tampering, obstruction of justice,'' he said.

In his own presentation, Mr. Lowell planned to explore the intent of the Founding Fathers when they put the power of impeachment into the Constitution, and to cite precedents that have set a high threshold for removing a President from office.

Another broad theme in Mr. Lowell's argument, according to a Democratic official, will be that in many cases Mr. Starr's evidence falls short of proving the offenses with which he has charged the President.

Last week, lawyers sympathetic to the President circulated an eight-page legal memorandum arguing that Mr. Starr had created a ''misleading chronology'' and an ''unfair rendering of the facts'' when he charged that Mr. Clinton ''endeavored to obstruct justice'' by helping Ms. Lewinsky find a job in New York when she faced being called in the Jones case.

The lawyers argued that the facts showed that Ms. Lewinsky's desire to leave Washington arose long before she was named in the Jones case and that the President ''provided only modest assistance.''

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, also said today that he did not believe false statements under oath ''in and of themselves'' are necessarily impeachable. ''The answer is that it is unclear and probably not,'' he said.

The meeting of the House Judiciary Committee will set in motion only the third Presidential impeachment process in the history of the republic. Aware of the high stakes, Republicans and Democrats on the committee each took home large briefing books over the weekend to help them prepare for an all-day session expected to be widely televised.

Late Monday or on Tuesday, the committee is expected to vote along party lines, with Republicans pushing through a recommendation that Congress investigate ''fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach William Jefferson Clinton.'' The wording is modeled after the impeachment resolution used to open the investigation into Richard M. Nixon.

Democrats will vote for their own proposal to limit any inquiry to the Lewinsky matter and to complete it by Nov. 25. They would set up a two-step process in which the committee would first seek to define what it considered an impeachable offense and then see if any evidence against the President met that threshold. Only after that would the committee decide whether to open a formal impeachment inquiry.

While the committee is expected to split along party lines, it is unclear whether Democrats from conservative or swing districts will vote in the full House with the Republicans on the impeachment inquiry once the Democratic proposal is voted down.

Once the House opens an impeachment inquiry, it is up to the Judiciary Committee to hold hearings and clear the President or vote on articles of impeachment. The House then must decide whether to impeach -- the equivalent of an indictment. In 1974, Nixon resigned before the House took its impeachment vote.

''I truly hope that the President is not impeached,'' Representative James E. Rogan, a California Republican, said on ''This Week.'' ''I hope that when this is all over, we can exonerate him. I'm not sure where the facts are going to lead.''

If the House approves articles of impeachment, the Senate then holds a trial of the President and acts as the jury. It takes a two-thirds majority to convict a President and remove him from office. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached but the Senate failed to convict him by one vote.

By its nature impeachment is both a quasi-judicial and a political process, and both political parties will be carefully watching the midterm elections to see whether they produce a landslide against the President's party or offer any mandate on how to proceed.

Mr. Hyde conceded today that there were not enough votes in the Senate to remove the President from office. ''That would have to be done by the Senate in a bipartisan way,'' he said. ''They won't do that until the American people move, and they have to move from where they apparently are if the polls are true.''

Even if Republicans pick up five Senate seats in November, as some strategists predict they will, they would still fall short of the number needed to convict unless Democrats swing to their side.

While they have accused the Republicans of moving too quickly to judge Mr. Clinton, Democrats, too, are walking a careful line. Their alternative proposal is an acknowledgment that they are not willing to stop the impeachment process right now.